The Commercial vs. Conceptual Debate Wages On at Fashion Week in Australia

Walk down any road in Sydney, Australia, and you’ll find yourself immersed in a world of chill. The people are tall, tan, and honey-haired, walking slowly to wherever, eyes on the skies, not their iPhones. It’s perhaps as a reaction to the general pleasantness of Sydney that Australian fashion has an obsession with belabored and embellished designs. Throughout the week I spent at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Australia, I saw more ruching, ruffling, embellishment, cutouts, and knotted details than in an entire season of shows in New York, London, Milan, and Paris. The obsession with flou is not just on the runway, either; women outside the shows at MBFWA favor this sort of soigné spirit. In some ways, it feels lifted from two of Oz’s most successful exports, Dion Lee and Kym Ellery, and in others, lifted from the style of the country’s most famous bloggers, Nicole Warne and Margaret Zhang. Either way, this free-spirited mode of dress dominated the runways of the week, turning up at brands like Maticevski, Manning Cartell, Bec & Bridge, By Johnny, and Kitx. In most cases, it was easy, breezy, and beautiful, but some looks ended up looking overwrought, even uncomfortable. This general dishabille spirit and commercial nature of the majority of the shows only made the outliers stand out more.

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Romance Was Born; Di$count Universe

Photos: Francesc Ten / Indigital.tv

Among the week’s eccentric highlights were Romance Was Born and Di$count Universe, both experts in the strange, surreal, and suggestive. At the former’s show on Wednesday morning, designers Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales paraded out 20-odd looks fit for a magpie heiress in electric hues and surreal embellishments. The surreal motifs continued into the evening at Melbourne-based Di$count Universe, though here they had gone from the animalistic to the profane. And sure, you’d see the occasional “fuck” or worse beaded on a dress, but designers Nadia Napreychikov and Cami James’s intricate handiwork and immense attention to detail deserve to be celebrated.

Experimentation flourished in smaller doses at Christopher Esber, Emma Mulholland, Aje, and House of Cannon. The latter three used fun—and funny—prints in commercial silhouettes, while Esber conducted some studies in form and fabric that ranged from the coolly successful (loose teal pants and a floor-length net top) to the slightly off (an ill-fitting bustier comes to mind). Aussie mainstays like Tome and Dion Lee returned home, too, to add their signature casual spirit and sporty sex appeal, respectively, to the mix.

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Tome; Dion Lee

Photos: Getty Images; Marie Lantin

Still, the overwhelming vibe of the week favored commercial viability over creativity. The proof is in the fact that Australia’s best talent is headed elsewhere: Dion Lee and Tome show—and live—primarily in New York, Romance Was Born is moving to Paris, and Di$count Universe’s designers work out of Bali and Melbourne. If Fashion Week Australia wants to become a major international player, it needs to work to champion its native designers and keep them in Oz. Aligning its collections with the Resort 2017 shows in the Northern Hemisphere was a good start that made the week easier for buyers and press, but for those on the hunt for something uniquely Australian, MBFWA still has a little ways to go.